David Snowball

Company: Mutual Fund Observer, Inc.

Areas of Expertise: mutual fund investing, propaganda and persuasion

Website: www.mutualfundobserver.com/aaii

Twitter Feed: @MFObserver

Books: “Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority” (Praeger, 1991), “Theory and Practice in Academic Debate: A Reference Guide” (Augustana College, 1994)

Topics Presented in Speeches:

• “Saving yourself from yourself … likely from the media, your adviser and large financial services firms,” mediated presentation to the AAII Baltimore Chapter, March 3, 2018.
• “The power of asking the wrong question: How to thrive despite bad journalism and bad impulses,” presentation to the AAII Albuquerque Chapter, March 15, 2017.
• “Managing the challenge of demographic and cultural change in small, nimble organizations,” keynote address to the Ultimus Fund Services client conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 1, 2015.
• “Becoming Wildly Successful: Seven things that matter, two that don’t, and one that might,” keynote address to the Cohen Audit Services conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 21–22, 2014.

Email: david@mutualfundobserver.com

Biography:

David Snowball, Ph.D., is a professor, chair of the department of communication studies and holder of the Stuart Lee and Virginia Talbott Harbour Endowed Chair at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Augustana is a nationally recognized college of the liberal arts and sciences, founded in 1860. Snowball’s teaching portfolio at the college includes: advertising and consumer culture; propaganda in the 20th century; communication and emerging technologies; business and professional communication; and historiography.

For a quarter century, Snowball competed in academic debates and coached college debate teams to over 1,500 individual victories and 50 tournament championships. When he retired from that research-intensive endeavor, his interest turned to researching fund investing and fund communication strategies.

Snowball served as the closing moderator of Brill’s Mutual Funds Interactive (a Forbes “Best of the Web” site). From 2006–2011, he was the senior fund analyst at FundAlarm and author of over 200 fund profiles. His monthly column was read by around 5,000 people. In 2011, he and Cheryl Welsch (aka “Chip,” dean of curriculum at the Eastern Iowa Community College District and MFO’s technical director) launched the Mutual Fund Observer.

Mutual Fund Observer, a non-commercial site and nonprofit corporation focuses on smaller and newer funds, often from boutique advisers, and on the issues challenging individual investors, draws 30,000 readers a month.

Snowball’s work has been cited in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The New York Times, Investment News, Business Week, Bottom Line: Personal and Fund Intelligence, and on the web at Motley Fool, MSN Money, CBS MarketWatch and elsewhere.